Why do black people run faster than white?

The only question to ask here is, why are so may people looking for racial stereotypes? It's not a question of biology, but one of sociology.

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I think the easiest example (in favor of biology instead of sociology) would to compare a country like China vs a country like United States. Chinese athletes all look the same (not trying to be racist here), they all come from the same genetic heritage. But United States has people from all different backgrounds and ethnicity.

So why is it that the US' track athletes are all black? It is not because white athletes were never given the chance to run, or that they looked for higher forms of sport. If you do think that there is a social explanation, then white athletes in track would have received more sponsors or opportunities. But it still stands that US' most successful athletes are black. So it's not the country's social standing or problems that create the skewed results.

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The only question to ask here is, why are so may people looking for racial stereotypes? It's not a question of biology, but one of sociology.

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I disagree, because biology makes a difference. The dual standard is needed to hide this fact. The black athlete is a thorn in the side of the PC illusion because it raises wild fires, as the youth begin to question using cause and effect. I believe in natural selection and not PC unnatural selection. Notice the black athlete generates wealth for countries, instead of deficit spending to perpetuate unnatural with social mops.

On the other hand, this is a stereo-type that is not true of all blacks. When I was grade school, I could out sprint all the blacks boys my age in my city. I usually afraid before the races, because I just assumed I would get my butt whooped by the tougher looking black kids. As I got older, my relative speed slowed with respect to the same boys, since my priorities changed. Instead I worked more on my body strength. I looked weaker than my better muscle toned black friends, but I was stronger. I attributed this to my Eastern European ancestors. This part of the world has a lot of strength records. They also put out fast sprinters.

The America melting pot originally worked under the assumption that all peoples have useful ingredients to add. The idea was to let each race or culture add their best ingredients to the pot so the entire team could aspire to the best of the best. The black athlete adds beef to the soup. Now we are supposed to add processed ingredients to the soup, because we are conditioned to think this is as good as natural.

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they ARE the same before the law.
the ONLY exception is if you are judged mentally incompetent.

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In other words everyone should have the chance to be the best they can be, what ever that best maybe, they should all be given the same chance to find out. So if your a black boy from hawaii, you should be given the same chance to become president of the united states as say a rich white boy from Connecticut (who thinks he from Texas), its just a matter of either of these boys having the will, intelligence and diligent to achieve that dream. External judgement need not apply, if you have the will and capability you should raise up because of it, regardless if that will and capability is consider unusual for your race/gender. Of course trying to make laws to try to give everyone a fair and equal chance is not easy, those rich white boys have to do a fraction of the work and thinking to become president then the black boy, and trying to even that clout with scholarships for minorities and affirmative action policies is considered by some to be liberal or PC schemes based on thoughtless intention.

I am 'white', 62 years old, live in Detroit and run 7 miles a day every day, regardless of weather or temperature. There are other runners here that are also consistent in their practice. One of them is young 'black' fellow in his 30's who sometimes runs with a local group of serious runners - all 'white' fellows in their 20's. The dark fellow hits the trails when I do early in the morning and warms up by running 5 - 10 miles very fast. He then meets up with the younger fellows and runs that same route with them, though a bit slower. He is remarkably fast and routinely runs long distances. He moved here from Kenya. We are about the same height, though he is lean and I am large. All of the other fellows are tall and lean - built as one would expect a runner to be built.

Race may be a variable, but individual biology, environment, dedication, practice, determination, tradition, pride and other such variables contribute a very large part to any individuals ultimate success as well.

I think the easiest example (in favor of biology instead of sociology) would to compare a country like China vs a country like United States. Chinese athletes all look the same (not trying to be racist here), they all come from the same genetic heritage.

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We all come from the same genetic heritage, don't we, and it's evidently African. The "they look all the same" argument is purely sociological, and the causes for American ethnic and racial diversity is strictly due to immigration. Otherwise we would "all look the same" -- as the original inhabitants of the Americas, before their virtual (and in some cases, real) extinction.

So why is it that the US' track athletes are all black? It is not because white athletes were never given the chance to run, or that they looked for higher forms of sport.

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I notice you did not say "Latino" or "Native American" or "Arab American" etc. You are apparently referencing this to the white experience. That was the sociological element I was referring to.

If you do think that there is a social explanation, then white athletes in track would have received more sponsors or opportunities.

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You misunderstand me. I was referring to the attitude that dissects the data this way, not social factors among athletes. I did mention that running is among the cheapest of sports, and suggested that cost is an overriding factor among the poor. Imagine how a struggling poor black family might really wish their child could join the school hockey team, only to realize that the costs (such as equipment) are simply beyond their means. Then again, if they live in Mississippi, they don't see ice very often, do they.

But it still stands that US' most successful athletes are black.

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Many are. Many aren't. Athleticism is as much an attitude as it is prowess. What's the point? Suppose the question was "people who drive a Ford" or "people who like ice cream". Would you question the ethnic makeup of such respondents? Now suppose the question was "people who live in Mississippi vs people who live in Connecticut". Can you find cause to treat this differently?

I suppose if you want to say that blacks are physically superior to whites, you might explain that you are referring to a particular phenomenon in post-slavery America, correlated with the selection of superior human beings on the auction block, in the manner that cows and bulls are selected for breeding stock. You certainly would not expect to have found too many athletes among the former prisoners at Darfur, or any place where misery and starvation lead to the wasting of the potential athlete's muscle tissue. It's certainly as real today as ever. Consider the ethnicity of hunger. There's where the white world view falls apart, where you find bony women trekking all day with kids strapped on, walking for perhaps hours just to fetch water. And notice, there is no Olympic event for that, is there. Sounds like an attitude issue to me.

So it's not the country's social standing or problems that create the skewed results.

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"Skewed" is an attitude, the fascination of sociologists. In science, we step back and take the objective stance, one that seeks to debunk all myths and stereotypes, one that tries to avoid confirmation bias, and certainly one that does not presume to see the world through the lens of "the white experience".

Football is a very expensive sport, played intensively during youth by far more white than black people in the US. The pro level hires out of college - you have to get into college to pursue a career in football. It is also a major and attractive road out of poverty for more white than black people in the US (there are more low income white folks than there are black folks total, in the US). It pays high wages, provides large social perks, and is honored as a young man's career choice among most white people in the US. It provides entry to careers at the very highest levels of US society - Senator, Judge, Corporate Executive.

The fastest runners and jumpers on the US pro football field are almost all members of the "black" race. The positions in which running speed and jumping power dominate the initial physical requirements are almost entirely manned by young men with melanistic skin. In the defensive backfield, say, even at safety (the slowest DB position) a white face that can play at a high level is unusual enough to be famous, like this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Smith_(American_football) He was a terror in college, at a position in demand, scoring far above average on most attributes for the job, but still dropped to 29th in the NFL draft (almost out of the first round) because of doubts about his running speed (his scout camp 4.57 40 is what is called "adequate"). Like the other white guys in the defensive backfields of the NFL, he was hired in spite of his running speed, not because of it.

This is almost certainly genetic. The human species does harbor geographically established genetic variation, geographical pockets of people with some characteristic genetic differences. High range short distance running speed appears to be one of them - characteristic of people from a genetic pocket in the Congo and West Africa.

But it is not racial. The sociological races do not reflect the genetic variation patterns. The "US black" race, especially, is a grab bag of widely disparate genetic groups (as widely as humans get, anyway) unlikely to resemble each other in any respect other than species norm (not even the melanistic skin is from a common genetic pool). By circumstance of history (resistance to yellow fever and vivax malaria, coastal access) the US drew almost all of its plantation slave population from that one genetic pocket, which seems to have created a frequently misleading coincidence of skin color and foot speed/jumping ability within the US, too often translated into a coincidence of foot speed and sociological race.

So the question is not why black people run faster than white - that just confuses the matter. They don't, is the simple answer. The question is (or would be) why people from Central and West Africa tend to on average run faster over short distances than everybody else on the planet, including all the other "blacks".

And when considering it, one might also inquire into why the slower short distance northeastern genetic pocket up by the horn, the Kenyan and Ethiopian pocket, is so good at long distance running - to the point that an English college level cross country coach (and England respects the sport) bringing his team of elite, trained, well fed, well equipped, young men at the peak of their abilities on tour through Kenya, might come to the conclusion that the average high school in the region could choose on the spot and field a team from its regular classrooms capable of beating his.

Black people genetically from the highlands of northeastern Africa, the Andaman Islands, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and many other regions . . . .

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It's not correct to include the Native Australians (or whatever P.C. term replaced "aborigine") in that list. They are descended from the very first migration out of Africa, approximately 60KYA. Their ancestors left because of a famine (it was an ice age when too much water was locked up in glaciers and icecaps so rainfall was reduced) and ended up in Australia because, due to capricious weather patterns even in the worst of times, it was a paradise. ALL the rest of us are descended from the second migration ten thousand years later. So we "white" people of European ancestry are more closely related to the modern "black" people of Africa than the "black" Native Australians are.

Black people genetically from Central and West Africa, excluding the San and a couple of other groups, do run faster than white people over short distances.

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Funny you should bring that up. BOTH original migrations out of Africa were from the San tribe--we all have the genetic markers to prove it. Back then the San lived up around modern Ethiopia, so they were in the right place to cross over the Red Sea (a much narrower and shallower sea during an ice age, not hard to cross with stone age boating technology) into Asia. The desertification of North Africa pushed all the continent's original inhabitants southward, so the San now live in southern Africa. But they're still there and they're still the long-lost cousins of all non-African humans.

Anyway, isnt this a very obvious answer, its definitely biology, the evolution of biology based on environmental factors, we see it in all types of animals and creatures so why would anyone think that humans are unaffected. So Northern Africans run faster, most likely associated to the open plains and need to hunt, livestock of the area is predominately fast and would need to be hunted and chased down. Also the tribal hunter gather way of life was one of the last to still be present which would mean that they would be less likely to evolved away from these needs.

i actually had a pretty interesting discussion with a friend about why specific races have evolved in certain ways, no way racist but just highlighting sterotypes that are seen as quite accurate. Here are a few of the things that came up,

North Africans and predominately taller, darker and faster as we mentioned before all could be associated with the tribal living as well as north Africa position closer to equater makes them obviously darker, as you approach zambia and south africa you instantly notice that africans from the southern part of of Africa, are shorter, lighter in skin tone, and possibly more inclined to education - possibly from the culture impact of early english colonisation or some other reason.

People of asain decent are known for their high intelligence and short height - i believe this to be an evolution of culture, years and years of rice planting and calulations without any calculating equipment evolved the asain race to calculate numbers with much more ease. For the height, generations of rice planting - i would argue that they evolved to be closer to the ground specifically to make rice planting easier and to reduce damage to the back.

In the middle east arabs have evolved to have dark skin, have extra hair, extra sweat these are fairly obvious, dark skin to protect from the sun, the hair to keep the warm in the cold desert nights, and sweat to cool down in extreme heat, i would also argue stocky build which is more evident in mediterrian of arab decent such as the maltese, greek and italian, all use heave stone blocks in all construction, given them their short yet strong stature.

Caucasians have no need to block the sun and had hair to keep them warm, but once again i think generations of warm clothing specifically to keep them warm has removed the need for this evolutionary trait.

The reason is Black people (particularly Ethiopians) train at higher altitudes where there is less oxygen so when they compete at lower altitudes they have more oxygen allowing them to run faster: cramp and muscle pains are caused by a lack of oxygen and the muscles release an acid which hurts.